Summary

An ophthalmologist’s assistant with an unhealthy interest in human eyeballs goes on a killing spree to collect eyeballs for his overbearing mother’s collection. Reality soon takes a bizarre turn, both for the characters and the audience.

What to Expect

Anguish – not to be confused with the 2015 movie of the same name – is a movie so obscure that you’d have to be a real horror fanatic just to chase it down. And that’s just the beginning of your problems if you’re out to review it, because it’s also a mind-bender. You could compare it to Funny Games, in that it starts out being a horror movie that becomes a commentary on watching horror movies. You could note that watching it becomes a masochistic experience because the movie browbeats you for watching it. Then you realize you sound like a raving nut and have to back up and start describing it over again.

The Straight Dope

John (Michael Lerner) is an optometrist who is ironically losing his sight because of an untreated diabetes condition. He lives with his mother, Alice (Zelda Rubinstein, of Poltergeist fame), a creepy, whispery old witch who hypnotizes John into doing her bidding. She makes John kill people and steal their eyes, which has nothing to do with his own condition. Instead, possessing people’s eyes makes Alice’s powers grow, so she just makes him fetch her these eyes. So we end up with this medical-themed slasher with a unique concept told in a psychedelic way, filled with hypnotism motifs of spirals, eyes, spinning camera zooms, and shots of the random menagerie of pets the household keeps, including pigeons and snails. Zelda Rubinstein plays this to the absolute hammy max, her famous raspy whisper dominating the story and making her one of the creepiest horror villains to come along in some time.